MARCH 19, 2015
by Brett Smith
Based on remains found by Charles Darwin and
others, we knew that a group of mammals known as South American ungulates had a
body that resembled a camel, nostrils high on their heads and even short
elephant-like trunks.
Now, a new DNA analysis has just revealed
that these strange animals are closely related to horses, not elephants and
other animals with ancient ties to Africa, according to a
new study in
the journal Nature.
"Fitting South American ungulates to the
mammalian family tree has always been a major challenge for paleontologists,
because anatomically they were these weird mosaics, exhibiting features found
in a huge variety of quite unrelated species living all over the place,"
said study author Ross MacPhee, a curator
in the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Mammalogy. "This
is what puzzled Darwin and his collaborator Richard Owen so much in the early
19th century. With all of these conflicting signals, they couldn't say whether
these ungulates were related to giant rodents, or elephants, or camels--or what
have you."
Note to plastic surgery recipients: Collagen
lasts a long time
To reach their conclusion, the study team
analyzed DNA from collagen, which can survive for a million years or more in
the hot ecosystems of South America. The chemical framework of the amino acids
that makeup collagen is determined by particular coding sequences in the
organism's DNA. Due to this crucial relationship, amino acid compositions of
the same protein in various species can be analyzed, offering clues about how
tightly species are related.
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